How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide
By Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay (Da Capo Lifelong Books)
If you have never had a difficult conversation, you are not human. Whether it’s with parents, siblings or kids, or even with those distant family members you only see once a year, it just happens. No one always sees eye to eye with anyone else, especially on important matters.
Increasingly, it’s also true whether it’s online, one-on-one, or at the family meeting table. Somehow, it’s so much work having to navigate through multiple perspectives to find a safe landing point.
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And, of course, if you’re a farmer in today’s Canada, you also know about another type of difficult conversation, one that involves speaking about farm practices to a non-farm audience.
We also all know the danger too. It can be so easy to get sidetracked or to lose sight of our real goal when a conversation becomes emotional or fraught with misunderstandings.
In their book How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide, authors Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay offer tips to generate meaningful outcomes from challenging conversations.
The book walks you through how to identify an impossible conversation. It covers the fundamentals of a good conversation too, and it offers beginner to advanced skills for engaging with (and persuading) your conversational partner to “foster a climate of civility, connection and empathy.”
Below are a few of their beginner techniques. (For intermediate and advanced strategies, go buy the book.)
The fundamentals of good conversations
Once you’ve identified the general purpose of your conversation (anything from simply chatting and connecting to reaching an agreement on an important issue), it’s essential to abandon adversarial thinking.
“Make understanding your conversation partner’s reasoning your (initial) goal,” say the authors. “Shift from ‘This person is my opponent who needs to understand what I’m saying’, to ‘This person is my partner in a conversation and I can learn from him.’”
It’s also critical to build rapport by finding common ground right out of the gate because “the more individuals diverge in their stances, the more important it is to build and maintain rapport,” say Boghossian and Lindsay.
Another key ingredient to good conversations is listening. It might seem obvious, but generally people listen because they’re waiting for a pause. Then, they can interject what they’ve been waiting five minutes to say, not necessarily to respond thoughtfully to what the speaker was talking about — but it’s the latter that will drive the conversation successfully forward.
Then learn to distinguish between delivering a message and authentic conversation. “Delivering a message feels like teaching, whereas a conversation has a give-and-take that rewards with learning,” write Boghossian and Lindsay. “If you find yourself thinking, ‘If they only understood this point, they’d change their mind’, you’re delivering a message … Often people you find frustrating are just trying to help; equally often, they’re doing so from the messenger stance. That’s why they frustrate you.”
The lesson? Don’t be that person.
Strategies for better conversations
The authors say that good conversations can be built off a simple framework: “Approach every conversation with an awareness that your partner understands problems in a way that you don’t currently comprehend.”
Similarly, realize that you might have different definitions for the same words, and that this can cause frustration and miscommunication. It might be important to clarify some terms up front since “disagreements about definitions can easily derail moral conversations because words can signify profoundly different things to different people,” say Boghossian and Lindsay.
To get to the crux of a matter, the authors suggest focusing on questions, not broad topics. As far back as ancient Greece, philosophers recognized the tactical value of targeted questions. Open-ended questions in particular (questions that do not allow a simple yes or no answer, but require someone to express their thoughts at length) encourage engagement. Then, if the conversation gets off track, you can bring it back on line. When the conversation strayed or things became unclear, Socrates returned to the original question. You can do it too.
Arguably the most crucial strategy for avoiding contentious conversations is to shift from blame to contribution.
“Blame is one-sided … It invites defensiveness, hostility and incivility,” point out Boghossian and Lindsay. Contribution means identifying and owning up to the part you’ve played in the issue being discussed. (Check out the book Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most for more on the idea of contribution.)
“One key to realizing you can have seemingly impossible conversations is recognizing that discussions are natural learning environments for both people,” the authors write. “Treating an individual as a partner in civil dialogue does not mean accepting their conclusions or buying into their reasoning.”
You can turn impossible conversations into conversations where everyone can safely express themselves. You can learn to understand and be understood. And, hopefully, everyone, including you, will come out of it a little smarter.
